Alchemist's Spell

Londa Marks appears twice in this catalog, and the pairing sketches an artist's range: the Crow's Magick worked early computer-generated imagery, while the Alchemist's Spell distills to twenty-two majors on alchemical spell-work, transformation's laboratory turned toward practice rather than study. A majors-only alchemical deck concentrates what the theme already concentrates; the great work was always a trumps sequence. The spell-work framing distinguishes it from the shelf's scholarly alchemists, Place's emblem rigor, the Cards of Alchemy's apparatus: Marks's register is operative, the symbols as ingredients rather than diagrams. The record runs thin, as her small-press output tends to; her decks circulate among collectors of the nineties esoteric-indie wave. It suits Marks completists pairing it with the Crow's Magick, practical-alchemy readers, majors-only users, and collectors of that decade's self-published occult. Those wanting the tradition's paperwork have the documented shelf; spells, famously, travel lighter.